Nick Capo: Employees enrolled in employer-managed health-care plans and citizens enrolled in government-managed Medicare undoubtedly possess a lengthy list of grievances and desires, but towering over all such petty concerns should be an awareness of their great good fortune.

Michael Sigman: I am a mechanical moron, a species to whom Larry David once gave voice when, in the opening scene of a 2009 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he exploded with “wrap rage” after a death-struggle with the plastic shell that encased a newly gifted GPS device. The mega-humiliating payoff comes at the end of the episode, when he’s lost and desperately needs to un-package the GPS. But the box cutter he’s sure will do the trick turns out to be so hard to open that it requires a box cutter of its own.

Thanks Max Baucus and the ObstructaDems and the GOP and Fox and the medico-insurance complex. You’ve really done a number on America. The question for the rest of us is: Why are we sitting at home reading this instead of storming Washington demanding the change we voted for?

Despite the fact that immigrants are healthier than US citizens, use less medical care, use less expensive care, and do not impose a disproportionate financial burden on the US health care system; Barrasso stubbornly holds that those undocumented immigrants who can afford health insurance shouldn’t even be allowed to purchase it because it would somehow “certify” their presence in the country.

Any talk of healthcare reform has to take into serious account the skyrocketing costs of co-pays and prescriptions. On the one hand, we can’t play up the benefits of preventative healthcare but then charge the patient an arm and a leg, no pun intended.

There you have it. For-profit companies best serve the public interest precisely because they are not subject to public control. Why? Because the public wants what is worst for the public. And how does the Washington Post know this? It has dinner with all the right people, and charges them for the privilege.

The Body Politic

Dave Zirin: She is our Jordan. She is our Jim Brown. She is our Babe Ruth, calling his shots. She is no longer content to dodge bullets, but understands how to stop them. Serena is that rare athlete who has not only mastered her sport. She’s harnessed it.